In August, the number of unwound hanks I had acquired from store-closing sales and yard sales as well as donated yarn for the community service group I crochet and knit with had reached alarming proportions. Sure, I could "bleed off" a hank or two every now and then at the LYS, if it was for a specific project and in good shape, but a lot of the donated yarn was pretty hopeless, and the yard-sale yarn was often questionable--big tangles, what looked like one ball actually being three or more, and so on.

It was becoming clear that I needed my own yarn ball winder. A member of the crochet forum I'm active in was creating plans on a slow basis for us to build our own winders, but he seemed to have "stalled out" in late May. (Sadly, he hasn't made any further progress even now since late May.) The ubiquitous plastic ball winders break under heavy use, so I knew that I'd need something of better quality, but the professional ones were way too much, both physically and fiscally.

At that very moment (cosmically speaking), I opened a magazine and saw The Ad. I couldn't tell whether it was an ad aimed at retail shops or individual buyers, but there was a website!

There was no order form at the website, though. There I was, looking at this amazing winder with no way to order it. Aieee! So, at something like 6:00 p.m. Pacific time (9:00 p.m. Eastern time), I picked up the phone and called Strauch's phone number. My plan was to leave a message asking them to call me for my order.

The owner of the business answered the phone in person! He told me to just go ahead and mail him a check and he'd make sure that the winder was ready to go.

I think he must have sent the winder the very next day, before he even received my check. Either that, or the winder made very good connections on its way west from Virginia, because it was in my hot little hands within a week!